by Mark A. Foster, Ph.D.

My theoretical orientation
(perspective for explaining sociological data), is eclectic and has been
most influenced by Roy's Bhaskar's critical realism and, to a lesser
extent, by Anthony Giddens' structuration theory. In addition, Emile Durkheim's and Peter Blau's approaches to
structuralism, Karl Marx's scientific socialism (essentially, his term for
sociology), Pitirim A. Sorokin's integralism, Georg Hegel's dialecticism, Erving
Goffman's frame analysis (post-dramaturgy), Charles Horton Cooley's social
psychology, Robert Heiner's critical constructionism, Arthur
Koestler's and Ken Wilber's approaches to holonism, and various
species of social constructionism, including Robert Heiner's critical
constructionism, have also been significant to this project. About
structuration theory, John Lye wrote:

Structuration Theory is a constructionist theory -- that is, a theory
which holds that humans are social constructs and that their
institutions of all sorts are constructs upheld by humans acting
according to their images of what reality is. The formulator and major
exponent of Structuration Theory is Anthony Giddens.

However, I also make use of Harold Garfinkel's
ethnomethodology, George Herbert Mead's social behaviorism, and many others.
Primarily, I am a macrosociologist. That is to say, overall, I am more
interested in large-scale, than in small-group, research and theory. This
section of the page will summarize my basic theoretical perspective.

I term this metaphysical,
transmodernist (containing elements of
modernism and postmodernism, i.e., accepting modernism while
moving beyond it) framework for the philosophy of science,
Neocritical Realism. Its postmodernism is largely limited
to a deconstruction of oppressive metanarratives or structures.

This paradigm is also dialectical,
meaning unity in diversity, which is my primary focus of analysis in
examining social structure. Lacking unity, individual diversity is
anarchy.

American society, in which a sociological imagination
is conspicuously absent, scapegoats individuals for social problems;
promotes a cult of the personality; glorifies fame and so-called celebrity;
misapplies the star label to well-known, high-profile (unfortunately)
performers, journalists, sports figures, and other media personalities;
transforms supposedly counter-individualist behavior, such as low self-esteem
and codependency, into diseases; hosts a huge cosmetics, and cosmetic
surgery, industry; and advocates psychotherapy as the panacea for all that
ails us.

All the above is, in my view, ultimately superstition and
magic. When people attribute truth and meaning to people and things which just a
little bit of critical thought would expose as highly problematic, they are
really engaging in magical thinking.

My own view is that, in order to understand the individual,
one must begin with the synergetic concept of social structure (on both
the macro and micro levels). In a psychologistic society, such as exists in the
United States, conceptualizing social structure as a force which
dominates, and acts over and above, any individual influences, is virtually
alien.

All societies and groups consist of both structure and
people. Except in fictitious or propositional works, one without the other is
inconceivable. A car, for instance, is built with both a blueprint and auto
parts. Lacking the blueprint (the structure), the parts have no meaning.

Social structures, or frameworks, include the various social
institutions (religion, the economy, education, the arts, etc.), in addition to
gender, race, social class, sporting arenas, particular classrooms, and so
on.

Manichean-like dualist conceptions of good and evil or of
right and wrong - moralizing, in other words - have dominanted much of modern
Western thinking. I propose a more structurally relativist model. Viewing social
action in relation to frameworks of values and norms will allow degrees of
approximation to a given structure and avoid the fallacy of bifurcation.

Furthermore, situations which might otherwise be perceived as
mentally or emotionally problematic might instead be viewed as instructive.
Indeed, our collective angst is, I believe, a product of excessive psychologism.

As social beings, learning takes place as we come into
dialectical tension with our structural surroundings. But to become engaged in
this type of trans-individual perception, one needs to develop a sociological
imagination and avoid conceptualizing one's experiences in purely personal
categories.

Knowledge, and what a culture defines as truth, are
grounded in the contingencies of dynamic structures. And truth itself, or at
least what may be referred to as such, emerges out of the particularities of
social interaction. The Platonic worlds of forms and of outward appearances are,
for all practical purposes, indistinguishable.

To return to our main subject, there are both micro- and
macro-structures. Each acts as a social force to delimit the range of socially
acceptable statuses and behaviors (i.e., averages). Individual exceptions, such
as those which may be attributable to neurological pathology, are not
significant for sociological purposes.

These structures are both enabling and constraining.
Society and the people who, along with social structures, constitute it,
adapt, over long periods of time or during periods of significant
large-scale crisis, through creative, dialectical interaction with these
structures.

Structures cannot be legitimately viewed outside of history.
The structure of race is the product of colonialism and slavery - both of which
continue to the present day. Structures typically change only in response to the
flow of history and its critical, often violent, events.

Slavery can be seen in the enslavement of African Americans
to poverty, unemployment, and ghettoization. African Americans make up only 12%
of the population. However, approximately 50% of the nation's prison inmates are
people of color. And 24% of young African American males are under some form of
correctional supervision.

Colonialism is most visible in the reservation system which,
although of some benefit to First Nations peoples, is largely controlled by a
European American power base in Washington.

The terms "structural" and "structuralism" are used with a
variety of meanings in sociology. This fact is particularly confusing to those
who come from some other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, philosophy,
and (especially) linguistics, for whom structuralism almost exclusively refers
to the now largely unsubstantiated ahistorical, synchronic views of Ferdinand de
Saussure and his followers (such as Claude Levi-Strauss). To Saussure, meaning
was found through word juxtaposition. For instance, I know that red is red
because it is not blue.

As I see it, there are two dimensions of social structure.
The first might be referred to as intersubjective structure. The second
could be called objective structure. I am not, however using
"intersubjective" in a psychologistic sense. I am referring to a shared
mentality, a collective consciousness, or a psychosocial cognitive matrix. Each
objective structure represents a particular type of social organization. Unlike
intersubjective structures, objective structures are material and concrete.

For instance, I witness socioeconomic and demographic
variation between social strata (objective structures), and, from it, I infer
the existence of stratifying intersubjective structures. However, I am unable to
directly observe (with my senses) those frameworks of inequality.

Yet, through attitudinal surveys and intensive interviews the
researcher can probe into these underlying, psychosocial frameworks. So, when a
set of commonalities in status/role perspectives are found in a population
regarding a particular social fact, we term it an intersubjective
structure.

Both levels of structure feed into one another through the
dialectical process of reflection. We reflect what actually exists (objective
structures) in the context of our a priori mental frameworks (intersubjective
structures). The social fact of life in a world of objective racial inequality
is internalized - reinforcing the (collective) intersubjective structures which
are formed during childhood. In turn, the collectively shared intersubjective
structures are projected onto experience and perpetuate objective structures of
inequality (race, gender, class, age, etc.).

Non-material culture (ideologies, values, knowledge, and
language) and material culture (artifacts) are both products of intersubjective and
objective structure. In other words, what we both believe and possess are
derived from our statuses. As a result, both aspects of culture are, according
to the existing system of social stratification or differentiation,
structured on the basis of power and resource allocation.

I will begin with a discussion of intersubjective structures.
Following that, I will continue with a description of objective structures.

Any intersubjective structure, such as race, class, or
gender, consists of a particular pattern of statuses (positions) and roles
(arrangements of norms, or sets of behavioral guidelines, which instruct people
on how to relate to other statuses). These intersubjective structures are
perpetuated intergenerationally through socialization, and they are reinforced
by living in a world in which they are seen objectively or materially in forms
of (frequently stratified) social organization or objective structure.

Intersubjective structures are, as I conceive of them,
frameworks of collective consciousness, i.e., matrices of knowledge
internalized by populations and groups of statuses (positions) and roles (the
behaviors expected from people occupying particular statuses when interacting
with others possessing the same or different social statuses) and how they are
organized (linked in affinity) in various social contexts.

Unlike Erving Goffman (who adopted Gregory Bateson's term), I
do not regard frames as distinct from social structures. Roles (sets of
norms), statuses, values, and language, as I see them, have their primary
existence on the cognitive and affective levels and not on the physical plane of
action and attribution.

The types of intersubjective structures (frames) prevalent in
particular societies are expressions of the dominant structural mentality
or collective consciousness (conscience). I refer to these
mentalities/modes of consciousness as conflictive (sensory, diverse,
attributional, or existing in the world of outward appearances) and
integrative (synthesizing, unifying, reflective, hermeneutic, or existing
in the world of ideal forms). Together, these mentalities are stages in the
dialectical (rational) process of accomplishing synthesis out of observable
conflict.

The conflictive mentality is diversity without unity.
However, in the integrative mentality, social reality (diversity) is framed in a
dialectical metaphysic of unity in diversity (focusing on the unifying factors
in human populations). Communication patterns are restructured from a polarizing
frame of contentiousness (making absolute assumptions of right and wrong)
to one based on cooperative problem-solving.

The dominant structural mentality is
typically demonstrated by those in positions of power. Structures often frame
the world into permutations of oppressor and oppressed statuses. In addition, it
is frequently to the advantage of power elites to promote chaos and conflict
among the disenfranchised in order to maintain their social control. (I am not
referring to any particular individuals but only to the structures in which they
play roles.)

As to free will: Although, admittedly, humans have a
degree of it, its extent is nowhere near to the level which many Americans
believe to be the case. Our destinies are, in my view, essentially
conditioned by the structures internalized within us. Thus, free will is
relative - relative to social structure - not absolute. It operates within
certain parameters.

The abolition of control, by government and by the
capitalists, as advocated by Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchists, is somewhat
beside the point. Rather than eliminating coercive power (a dubious objective at
best), the goal must be the establishment of a more humane system of normative
coercion based on a consultative dialectic of unity in diversity.

Collective consciousness and its constituent structures
are products of history. They change with the procession of history and
as humans, acting within the context of their structures, respond to
significant challenges and crises.

Now, continuing with objective structure, we here move from
the intersubjective aspect of structure to concrete patterns of resource
allocation and culture. Objective social structure consists of variations in
wealth, property, and other resources. It is also geographic or spatial (human
ecological, in other words). In addition, it includes the concrete acts people
engage in (derived from their statuses and roles) and the manners in which
people label the objects in their environment (also framed by their statuses and
roles). Objective structure is mutually dependent with the intersubjective
structures of prestige and power.

Objective structure consists of observable social
differentiation and stratification, on the one hand, and cultural artifacts (the
distribution of those artifacts, observable behavior, and the labels attached to
people and things in our environment), on the other. As such, it is amenable to
empirical investigation, while intersubjective structure itself, in my
view, is not. The latter can only be studied by reference to its objective
correspondant. Intersubjective structure and objective structure are
interdependent and exist in dialectical tension with one another.

Thus, cultures (total ways of life) and subcultures may be
regarded as the ephemeral correlates of collective consciousness and the
idealized, or formal, social structures which those mentalities incorporate.
They are, to take anthropologist Arthur Koestler's term (recently borrowed by
Ken Wilber), holons - holons within holons. In a holarchy (again, Koestler's term), each holon, or structure of complexity, appears as a
self-sufficient whole, until it is viewed in the context of the next highest
holon.

Structure is a creation of history. We are the witnesses, in
a succession of moments, to the culmination of all the influences preceding it.
How can we encourage the establishment of social movements which will respond
progressively to history's onward flow?

It appears to me that, at the present historical moment, the
collective consciousness or structural mentality needs to be transformed from
one so heavily dominated by social conflict to one which resolves
relative contradictions within the context of unity in diversity, i.e., through
a progressive internalization of the unific principle.

Ultimately, social structural change is realized in a
dialectic between communities, with their existing structures, and history. It
is the result of how society, in the context of existing structures,
collectively responds to the challenges of history. It is not the property of
individuals and their biographies.